Metal Messiah: Born Again Sage

By AARON MESH

[THREE NIGHT SONLY] Local music-video curator Nick "The Phantom Hillbilly" Wells takes his stand-up character of Sage the encyclopedic metalhead and puts him in a low-budget feature film, where he deliberates between selling his soul to Satan and finding salvation. (The Devil gets all the good tunes, and thus has the advantage. Plus Sage already wrote the lyrics to "Jesus Died of AIDS," and how often does inspiration like that come around?) The Laurelhurst Theater had to turn away 100 people from the premiere last fall, so apparently there's an audience for this. I'm not it. But I found myself admiring Wells' devotion to hesher antics and throwing up the horns, and I watched the picture with a smile on my face. People who get the jokes may laugh quite a bit more.